Thursday, October 14, 2010

the workspace page cannot be used for database icons error

Recently someone ran into an issue with their Lotus Notes client ( 8.5.1 FP1 ) showing an error after login:update:please read the last paragraph 08/22/2012
"the workspace page cannot be used for database icons"

We just upgraded this person to roaming and after a client restart this error kept showing up. So as a troubleshooting measure (and a process of elimination in which we renamed names.nsf, bookmarks.nsf to .000 extension, launched notes, a message about roaming the workspace popped up and out of the three options I choose the middle one, basically saying to ask me later. Then the notes client errored out saying it cannot find names.nsf. Lotus Note closed and then we renamed names.000 back to names.nsf ) we renamed the bookmarks.nsf to bookmarks.000 in the person's machine and Lotus Notes launched with out that error. However the new bookmark file does not have the same replica id as the one on the server and it did not pull down the bookmark.nsf from the server.

So we created a new replica of the bookmark.nsf from the roaming\ folder on the server to the local machine in hopes that the existing bookmarks.nsf was corrupted. We closed Lotus Notes, swapped the current booksmarks.nsf with the one replica made from the server and sure enough that fixed it.

After getting this issue over and over, I found a notes.ini parameter for the Lotus Notes client that prevents the client from roaming the workspace. This also fixed my issue without having to delete or restore my bookmarks.nsf ( however, the issue still exists, and will come back when you configure a new client minus this notes.ini parameter). Try using this notes.ini parameter on you workstation to prevent this error from happening again. Also, this notes.ini parameter was introduced in 8.5.1 and it clears your workspace and your view settings:DISABLE_WORKSPACE_ROAMING=1good luck :)
reference

Yeah we just delete the local bookmarks.nsf file from the user's profile and it gets rid of the problem... but also looses all of their bookmarks in the process, plus it happens again the next time they use a new computer. Really wish there was a proper fix for this..